Cord Whitley indeed. I was still chuckling to myself when I perched on one of the stools surrounding the piano in the Schooner bar late in the night the cruise ship departed from the Baltimore pier. His photo had been on the poster at the door to the bar—I had purposely passed by it several times during the afternoon and evening. He was quite a hunk, but I just didn’t see the piano player as a Cord Whitley.

I was pleasantly surprised, though, on entering the bar to find that, from what I could hear at this distance, both his playing and his voice were smooth. Only a couple of stools were available when I sat down. There was a couple, him older and awestruck and her a young blonde, possibly honeymooners, but just as likely boss and secretary, who were so engaged with each other that they could just as easily taken one of the tables rather than sitting right at the piano. Cord Whitley wasn’t the center of attraction for them. But there were two other unattached women, as I was, who quite obviously were zeroing in on the sexy-looking piano player. One was about my age and showing it—certainly much more than I’ve ever permitted myself to go to pot. I didn’t consider her competition. But there was a younger, giggly woman too. I hoped that her giggling would wear on him before his last set of the night was over.

I had timed my visit. It was all about strategy. I wasn’t new to this—certainly not new to the four-day Bermuda run from Baltimore. I won the trip regularly, twice a year, on the strength of my real estate sales. And I always came alone. I looked at the June-October couple. That had been George and me once. Now George only looked at blueprints for his construction company in Philadelphia with that sort of awe in his eyes.

Well, fuck George, I thought. He was moving from November into December and I’d kept no later than August, which was no mean feat.

“And you, Madame, is there some favorite music of yours that I might play?”

“Please call me Clarissa,” I said. “I don’t want it to sound like I run a house of ill repute.”

“Very good, Clarissa. Nice to meet you, even if not in a house of ill repute.” We both laughed. “Is there a favorite song of yours I can play for you, Clarissa?”

The voice was a rich, smooth baritone. The young chocolate-colored hunk with the dazzling smile and the masculine bald head was addressing me.

“I doubt that,” I answered, giving him a friendly smile—coquettish looks were for later, depending on how this progressed. “My favorite music is locked in time. I enjoy soft, romantic piano music from the fifties and sixties. Not that that’s my era, of course.” I wanted to establish that right off the bat. We wouldn’t be discussing, though, that my era of the late seventies wasn’t much later.

“Try me,” he answered with an easy grin that had me almost melting on the spot. “Some of my favorites are from that era as well.”

I tried him out on “Laura,” which any cocktail lounge crooner should be able to handle, and he handled it quite well. I was becoming increasingly interested in what he could handle well.

As the set moved on, at my request he moved through “Ebb Tide,” “Deep Purple,” and “The Shadow of Your Smile.” He seemed to be enjoying himself as much as I was, and he was only coming to me for song choices now, interspersing them with more recently popular and more upbeat tunes, mindful of his responsibility to the others in the bar. It was getting late and the bar crowd was thinning out. He and I were alone at the piano now, his focus on my song tastes having driven away the competition, I’m sure, although I was barely aware of them drifting away. The couple was long gone, unable to keep their hands off of each other before they left. I imagined them in their cabin already, fucking, and I wished them Godspeed. It wasn’t any less my goal for the night.

“I have time for only a few more,” Cord said. “This will end my set for tonight and then I’ll be free.”

Was that his way of signaling that our goals were the same?

“How about ‘Strangers in the Night’ to close out the evening?” I asked. “Are you up for that?”

I didn’t know if he’d catch the double entendre invitation.

He grinned and asked, “You mean the old Frank Sinatra song from the movie ‘A Man Could Get Killed’?”

He’d picked up on the invitation. “Not necessarily the song,” I answered. “And I’m surprised you know the movie title—although, I, for one, don’t bite. Unless, of course, I get excited.” I was extending a hand and laying a cabin pass card and a hundred-dollar bill on the top of the piano under his nose. Others had tipped him, of course, but no one was tipping him that much just to tinkle the keys.

He looked down at that and then up at me. His grin said it all.

I was in a junior suite—by myself. At the cruise check-in desk the woman hadn’t even lifted an eyebrow when I asked for a second pass card that only opened the door to my cabin. I was a well-heeled, expensively dressed and made up woman in her late fifties traveling alone in a single cabin. I’m sure they had figured out the needs of this type of traveler.

“Cabin 1966,” I said.

“Ah, a very good year,” he said. “That was the year the song came out.”

As I left the bar, he was playing “Strangers in the Night” and crooning, “Strangers in the night, exchanging glances, wond’ring in the night, what were the chances...”

He must have known that I would want to run my hands over those bulging chocolate-brown muscles of his chest and biceps as soon as we were alone, because he was taking off his shirt as he was closing the cabin door behind him. I had stripped down to my panties and bra and high heels. I looked damn good like this—I’d paid a fortune and sweated off god knows how many pounds to still look this good.

The heels were necessary because he towered over me. My lips only came to his sternum, between two bulging pecs, when we came together, but when I lifted my face up, he already was there, offering and demanding a deep kiss.

He was wasting no time. The kiss was possessive, the embrace was breathtaking, and the hand was reaching down, cupping and squeezing my muff. A finger was inserted in the leg hole of my panties and sliding through the folds of my labia and finding and rubbing my clit. This black beauty knew his business—which wasn’t all playing the piano.

We both knew that letting him finger me there was a “yes” to his cock.

I could feel the insistence of him at my belly, and after luxuriating in a series of moans for what he was doing with that finger, I sank to my knees and unzipped his trousers. The erect cock that I pulled out of his fly was as long and thick and black as I had hoped. The bulb was gigantic and pinkish brown in contrast to the nearly jet-black shaft. He grunted and grabbed the back of my head to help guide me as I closed my lips over the cock head and cupped his low-hanging ball sac and gave it a little squeeze.

When I rose and stepped back from him, I unhooked my bra and tossed it aside. His eyes went big, as did his dazzling white-tooth smile, and I heard a little growl rising from deep inside him. I would let him take care of the panties himself.

He quickly unbuckled his belt and pushed his trousers and briefs to the floor, stepping out of them, not that elegantly, as everything about his body and the way he was trembling told me that he was happy to see me.

Cord reached out with a hand, which touched my skin below my throat, causing me to groan at the heat of the touch, and I fell back on the bed, which was just behind me. The first thing he did was to slide my panties down off my legs and toss them in the general direction the bra had sailed away. He hovered over me, his fingers snaking inside my fold and then inside my cunt, ensuring that he could have me. I spread my legs wider, elevated my pelvis to his penetration, and rocked on the fingers. I guess checking out how far he could go, the fingers moved down to my anus and entered there. I laughed and let him penetrate there as well. And then, the growl louder than before he knelt between my thighs, which he had wrapped his forearms around and spread, and was grazing in my muff. I moaned and groaned for him, writhing on the bed in ecstasy at the expert mealtime technique he was displaying. He was eating my cunt and finger fucking my anal hole.

I surrendered all.

I experienced my first orgasm of the evening, of the cruise. Not the last, I was determined. And precisely the reason I took these short cruises to Bermuda twice a year.

Knowing I was down off the chandeliers for now, he kissed his way up my body, stopping for a long vacation at my breasts, which he seemed to enjoy particularly. So did I. The journey ended with him straddling my chest and presenting his cock again for mouth play. I let him do the driving. He was holding my wrists above my head and spread with his strong hands, and I just lifted my head off of the surface of the bed and let him slide the up-curved cock in and stroke at will until he felt sufficient hard again.

He fucked me bent over the bed on my belly, from behind, in long, slow strokes to begin with, increasing in speed and intensively as we both started the journey over the moon. He was fucking me in the cunt.

I had opened the nightstand drawer and shown him the condoms, but he had brought his own.

I exploded again before he came. When he’d done so, he just held there, embracing me close from behind, one hand playing my breasts and the fingers of the other still spreading my labia and rubbing my clit, knowing, in his experience, that orgasm for a woman wasn’t an event, it was a journey up to the stars. When I’d travel to the end of the galaxy again, he let me fall onto the bed. But he didn’t move away; his thighs were encasing mine.

I heard the snap of the latex of the removal of the spent condom and another snap of a new one being rolled on.

Hot damn. He was going to do me again, almost immediately after the first glorious ride. But then I tensed and gave a little yelp as, holding my cheek to the bedspread with a grip of one hand on the back of my neck, he entered my ass with a lubed finger. He was preparing me to fuck me there too.

I squirmed as the finger invaded deeper and moved around, but I quickly brought myself under control and relaxed. He could feel the tension draining out of me.

“Do you mind, Felicia?” he asked in the velvety, yet steely baritone voice of us. We obviously were on a first-name basis now. “You strike me as a woman who likes it.”

“Oh, shit, yes. Take me to glory,” I managed to gurgle. A woman of my age is likely to like almost anything a young, hung hunk wants to do that involves penetration.

And then he did just that—fucked me in the ass. He was more than quite good at it.

We were both exhausted and, by mutual consent, moved up onto the bed and I lay in his arms, languidly playing with his long, floppy, black cock as he did with my very expensive breasts. After a bit I urged him over onto his belly, straddled his buttocks, and gave his torso a deep massage that had him humming. I luxuriated in the hard suppleness of the muscles of his back and the milk-chocolate texture of him.

When I pressed him to turn over again, he was magnificently hard, and I mounted the cock, facing him, and rode it to the heavens while he thumbed my nipples, squeezed the bouncing breasts he didn’t seem to be able to get enough of, and used an index finger to make sure that my clit was getting all of the contact attention it deserved. The man rivaled the male escorts of Italy in the art of pleasing a woman. And he was big and black to boot.

As he was dressing, he noticed the bite marks on his neck. I’d drawn blood.

“I thought you said you didn’t bite,” he said.

“I said unless I got excited. You got me excited,” I answered.

He grinned at me. A smooth, easy fuck, with a touch of humor. I liked his style.

Night one of the four-day cruise to Bermuda. Tomorrow we would be on the sea all day. So far the ship’s staff was receiving high marks from me for service. I had found one black staff particularly useful.

It hadn’t been by accident that I had booked the cruise to Bermuda for the college spring break period. I liked my produce fresh.

I was up on the pool deck late in the morning, as soon as the temperature was high enough to bring out the swimmers. As I had hoped, the pool had been nearly taken over by the college students. I was feeling sleek and purry after the night with Cord, with whom I had scheduled a repeat visit for tonight. A hundred dollars for a hunk like that—for three fucks—was a steal when compared to rent-boy prices in Philadelphia, although the sons of family acquaintances went for nothing and often were surprisingly entertaining. I was surprise I wasn’t stiff. It had been six months, since the last cruise, that I had gotten such a workout from my Venezuelan room steward—who had cost three times as much.

I moved three times around the pool before I found the perfect spot. I saw the two young men when they left their lounge beds and dove into the pool. Both very young, divinely built, and with smooth, supple skin to rival a baby’s. Both were wearing skimpy Speedos, by which they each showed the promise of satisfying my requirements. One was the mandatory Nordic blond with curly hair and blue eyes to become lost in. The other was darker, perhaps more than a touch of the Mediterranean, and mysterious looking. The emphasis was on the young and impressionable, though. In one of my turns around the deck I’d heard them mention their college and that this was their second year, so, despite appearances, there wouldn’t be any risks on the age front.

They also struck me in another way that I had trouble isolating. I finally decided that it was the way in which they interacted with each other. Either they were close friends or intimate friends, I decided, and, rather than putting me off, I took this as a challenge.

When they had left to dive into the pool, I took a lounge bed directly across from theirs and posed myself in a way that would attract any red-blooded young American boy. If they still had eyes only for themselves, I reasoned, they were too far gone. If they shared the interest, the day may prove to be quite rewarding, I thought—correctly.

After they had returned, chatting to each other, and rubbing themselves off with towels, they got around to being attracted to me. I smiled at them over the edge of the Nora Roberts novel I was reading, and they smiled back, shyly at first but then more boldly. They whispered between themselves as they sat on their lounge beds and looked around at all the luscious young people waltzing by in nearly the altogether, the college men being boisterous and playfully knocking each other about as they moved.